On February 26, some of the nation's leading scientists and researchers—including five Nobel laureates and members of all three National Academies—will gather at Caltech to discuss some of the most perplexing questions facing humanity.

Built to look for gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space itself that were predicted by Einstein in 1915, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is the most ambitious project ever funded by the National Science Foundation. We talk to two Caltech researchers to learn about how LIGO came to be.